Category: Fiction

In the prologue of Lagoon, we see a swordfish swimming through the waters off Lagos, where something extraordinary is happening. The fish hears the loudest sound she’s ever heard, and then looks down and sees “something large and glowing” in the water: it’s a giant spaceship (5). “When a golden blob ascends to meet her,…

I kind of enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry despite feeling somewhat resistant to it, and I don’t really know what to say about a book that I found overly sentimental at times, but that also totally made me teary-eyed on the subway one day. OK, so, the premise: Harold Fry is 65, recently…

As I was reading this book (which was originally published in 1908, but is set during the Napoleonic Wars), I kept thinking about Hamilton, probably not surprisingly. Specifically, I kept thinking about the part of The Ten Duel Commandments that goes like this: [BURR] Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature? [HAMILTON] Sure…

The key things to know about this book, which was originally published in Irish in 1949, are explained by Alan Titley in his Translator’s Introduction. First: “In The Dirty Dust everyone is dead” (vii). And next: “It is a novel that is a listening-in to gossip and to backbiting and rumours and bitching and carping…

Two things that are true: 1) I don’t read that much SF. 2) When I do, I sometimes get a little impatient with world-building. I don’t know if there’s a cause/effect relationship between those two things, and if there is, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but I did…

If I’d known beforehand that Slade House is a kind of companion to The Bone Clocks (which I haven’t read—James Wood’s New Yorker piece about it made me unsure if I wanted to), I’m not sure I would have picked it up. But I think it works as a standalone piece, and, I don’t know,…

All the Birds in the Sky is the kind of crossover genre book, like, say, Lev Grossman’s Magicians books, that I can really get into. It’s smart and funny, and self-consciously places itself in/plays with genre conventions (quest narratives, saving-the-world stories, stories of outcast geniuses) and other literary conventions (star-crossed lovers, a sort of fairy-tale…

I don’t know what to say about American Gods, other than that I quite liked it, despite feeling like some parts of it lagged. (This may have been partly due to circumstances: while I was reading this book I got a cold, and when I have a cold I tend to be a bit grumpy…

In a section of The Egyptologist that’s presented as a piece of scholarly writing to be included in a forthcoming book that one of the (unreliable) narrators is planning to write about his (yet-to-be-realized) discovery of a tomb of an (apocryphal) Egyptian monarch who (perhaps) wrote a text called the Admonitions, we get this: The…